Analyse du basculement des modes d’extraction des eaux souterraines dans le Saïss (Maroc)

• Main Authors: Rhoda Fofack, Jean-Paul Billaud, Marcel Kuper, Olivier Petit
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Réseau Développement Durable et Territoires Fragiles 2018-06-01
• Series: Développement Durable et Territoires
• Subjects: groundwater resources; techniques of extraction; social worlds; environmental temporality; irrigated agriculture; Saïss aquifer
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/developpementdurable/12197

This paper analyses how changes in pumping modes of groundwater reveal social and territorial transformations within an agricultural landscape. Our case study is the Saïss plain in the North of Morocco, where irrigated agriculture is mostly based on groundwater. The paper shows how farmers switched from the use of groundwater from the shallow phreatic aquifer to the deep captive Liassic aquifer, as farmers turned from wells to tube-wells. We analyse the drivers of this change, both in terms of groundwater pumping practices and in the representations that actors associate with these practices. We analyze the cognitive bases and value registers that are linked to this change. As a consequence, two “social worlds” emerged, a “world of scarcity” and a “world of abundance”, which are not compartmentalized and operate in a form of hybridity and which reveal territorialities necessarily subservient to the temporalities that punctuate the construction of the social worlds of the hidden waters of the Saïss.